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'ST^

/ whores’
dialogue :

ON THE HISTORY
& RACISM OF
ANTI-TRAFFICKING

the
P

e p

U n
d d
i s

songs

Franz Liszt, Love Dream

Memphis Minnie, I'm Selling My Pork Chops

Fizz, Submarine Intro Song

Florence Price, Piano Sonata in E Minor: I. An¬
dante - Allegro

Sergei Prokofiev, Vision Fugitives , Op. 22, No.
16. Dolente

Clara Schumann, Sonate in G minor: I Allegro
Fanny Mendelssohn, Notturno in G minor
Sofia Gubaidulina, Chaconne

Lucille Bogan, Shave Em Dry

THE UNDERBELLI PODCAST

EPISODE 3

A Whores' Dialogue:

On the History and Racism of Anti-Trafficking
by Isidore and Erma VIP

sources

“Surveillance and the Work of Antitrafficking:

From Compulsory Examination to International

Coordination”

by Laura Hyun Yi Kang

from Feminist Surveillance Studies

“Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Femi
nism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom i
Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns”
by Elizabeth Bernstein

“Evangelical Ecstasy Meets Feminist Fury: Sex
Trafficking, Moral Panics, and Homonationalism
during Global Sporting Events”
by Gregory Mitchell

“Sexual surveillance and moral quarantines: a
history of anti-trafficking”
by Jessica Pliley

“Anti-trafficking campaigns, sex workers and the
roots of damage”
by Carol Leigh

“The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on
Drugs”

by Elizabeth Brown

Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class
and the State
by Judith Walkowitz

TULLIA

Dearest Madame Rosa,

I hope this finds you well. I am writing from a place
of confusion today. As I was out running errands for
the cat, getting some little treats, you know, the
dry fishy ones, I passed by something very distress¬
ing. A panel on the bus stop was sullied by an adver¬
tisement in that wretched, overly wholesome, modern
style. A voice bubble on it spoke to passersby: "I
am priceless ... and my body is not for sale”. I stood
in front of it gazing at my reflection for some time
and found myself filled with confusion about it all.
These past few months have already been a challenge,
as I’ve been establishing myself in the industry and
all, learning who my friends are, you know the gamut
well. So this ridiculous advertisement had me totally
asunder. There was another part too - it read: “there
is a way out of sexual exploitation” with a string of
numbers to call. What are they trying to say, if not
that anyone who might choose to sell sexual services
is exploiting themselves? And, moreover, exploiting
themselves more than they would be selling any oth¬
er kind of service?! Does not all work ask of us to
put a price on our bodies, our time, our labor? Might
you help me understand this take? Perhaps offer some
words of wisdom, so that I might put myself back to¬
gether?

My love to you, you and your ancient wisdom,

Tullia

NARRATOR

In this episode, we’re going to channel some stories
about the history, racism, and work of anti-traffick¬
ing .

The recent anti-trafficking bills FOSTA and SESTA have
gained a lot of media and activist attention since
they passed almost unanimously in April. Much of the
coverage about the bills draws attention to how they
unambiguously make working conditions precarious and
more dangerous for sex workers, pulling online plat¬
forms suddenly away from people. How can something
seemingly well-meaning for some pose such a danger to
others? We are not going to discuss FOSTA and SESTA
directly here since a lot of good stuff already ex¬
ists critically looking at these bills’ effects. A
typical response that is formulated is that congress’
anti-trafficking efforts have unintended consequences.
Our approach will be more to map what has motivat¬
ed anti-trafficking work from its origins in the late
eighteen hundreds to the present. To do this we need
to take a step back and ask some simple questions.
What is sex trafficking? How is it defined? Why is an¬
ti-trafficking generally in opposition to sex work?

How are sex work and trafficking related? Who desig¬
nates that relationship?

We’d like to state outright that in no way do we at
the Belli Research Institute intend to deny the ex¬
istence of coercion that is possible in the sex in¬
dustry, or any other kind of labor, nor do we deny
the reality that exploitation can happen by johns
and pimps just as with managers and bosses. Nor do
we deny the myriad ways that women may face misogy¬
nist violence both in and out of their work lives.

It should also go without saying that our use of the
word “woman” throughout this is in no way an essen-
tialized or biological category.

Trafficking does exist, but we question the organi¬
zations that push morality, numbers and ideology.
According to statistics - whatever those are worth
- most trafficking is for the purpose of extra-cheap
laborers, not sex trafficking where most groups fo¬
cus. We think it is pertinent to provide some context
about the specific history of trafficking, since it

lations, enforcing border control, and ensuring that
other nations curtail prostitution than they have
been at issuing any concrete benefits to victims and
survivors. We contend that this is due not just to
"unintended consequences”, but is a direct result of
certain strands of feminism joining forces with the
state and NGOs to uphold a certain, white, carcer-
al vision of society. When groups rely on the state
and police, they will inevitably be relying on crim¬
inalization and punitive measures for change. The
crackdowns that happen first are generally on the
most visible sex workers, like those on the streets,
who are usually people of color. This also includes
crackdowns on pimps and clients, who in the street
based sexual economy, are also mainly non-white.

The rise of the internet as a platform for sex work
has changed the game and provided a certain level of
autonomy for sex workers. Bills like FOSTA and SES¬
TA are a rearticulation, dressed up for the internet
age, of the same ideology that has existed for over a
century and perceives the prostitute as haboring risk
for trafficking and therefore in need of checking.

An interesting framework that others have suggested
is that this war on sex trafficking is like a new war
on drugs. A lot of hype, a lot of arrests, and a lot
more money and technology for police. By now there
have now been ample investigations into the war on
drugs which have shown their invention of the prob¬
lem through racist logics and which have resulted not
in the suppression of drug use but the imprisonment
of black men. We would hope that this whores’ dia¬
logue might similarly show how the so-called war on
sex trafficking is not stopping misogynist violence
or exploitation, but instead empowering the carceral
system, upholding stigma, shutting down avenues for
sex workers, and making the work generally more dan¬
gerous .

I have a suspicion actually. . .perhaps the construc¬
tion of sex trafficking as a major modern crisis of¬
fers people a way to feel more secure on their moral
highground. They can remain assured that the problem
of misogynist, racist violence is in a particular
group of “evil” people. Perhaps it is also a way for
them to engage with a sex-saturated culture such as
ours without threatening their moral status or social
position. Perhaps this is why too the lawmakers can¬
not get enough of the services we provide...

I’ve also noticed that every time a major sporting
event comes around, the reformers - from evangeli¬
cals to liberal feminists, just as you say - double
up on their efforts to emphasize just how significant
a threat trafficking is and yet no one I’ve work with
or spoken to has encountered anything like this. And
then the game is over and the hype dies down and all
that’s left is more police trolling our websites and
invading our places of work.

Well. I’ll let you rest. Be well wise one, and, as
always, thank you for feeding me,

Yours for eternity,

Tullia

NARRATOR

We’d like to offer a few words in conclusion. As an¬
ti-trafficking has become such a celebrated cause and
given rise to a whole rescue industry, perhaps we
should pause to think more about it. If rescue comes
in the form of policing and policing is justified as
rescue, then what is happening to those being swept
up?

In the US, anti-trafficking campaigns have been far
more successful at criminalizing marginalized popu-

does have very specific origins and involves a specific
language. We want to explore the premise that since
first appearing, the work of anti-trafficking has more
often made things worse for women, especially women
of color, than it has done to help.

The word “traffic”, which comes from the middle French
and was first used in English in the 1500s, is orig¬
inally defined as “the transportation of merchandise
for the purpose of trade.” We can now use the word
traffic to refer to frustrating stagnation on highways
or how many views our websites get - but the word
“trafficking” takes on an entirely different emotion¬
al register. Already by the 1600s “with a sinister
or evil connotation” had been added to the definition.
Today, trafficking probably brings to mind exploited
people - but especially women and girls and especial¬
ly sexual exploitation - who are taken across borders
against their wills and forced into horrible situ¬
ations. If you search online dictionaries in 2018,
the definition for “trafficking” is now generally “the
trade in something illegal”, like in “drug traffick¬
ing” .

Though “human trafficking” refers to the traffic of
people forced into any kind of labor, it is sex traf¬
ficking specifically that has taken center-stage in
most anti-trafficking organizations.

The US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of the ear¬
ly 2000s defined sex trafficking as “a commercial sex
act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which
the person induced to perform such an act has not
attained 18 years of age;” OR as “the recruitment,
harboring, transportation , provision, or obtaining of
a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act."
Note here that no condition of force, fraud or abuse
or even a third party role is stipulated in the lat¬
ter definition. In many states, for example, someone
can be charged with trafficking for driving someone to
work who is going to do sex work.

What exactly are people talking about though when
they speak of trafficking? Since the time of the
self-proclaimed moral reformers of the Victorian era,
the work of most anti-trafficking organizations has
pulled a clever - or perhaps not so clever - rhetor¬
ical conflation of sex trafficking with prostitution.

It is important to disentangle what it means when sex
trafficking is considered the same as prostitution,
no matter what you think about prostitution. This is
important because at stake is not just a battle of
morals but groups of people who have opinions and
agency and lived experiences. When we look to legal
definitions of sex trafficking or prostitution we are
looking at heavily moralistic, strategic ideologies,
not realities. What has happened by flattening these
together is that it has served as a precedent for at
least 150 years to inflate law enforcement and crimi¬
nalize women who were foreigners, who were non-white,
who were considered deviant, or who simply existed at
the margins of society, no matter what work they were
doing .

What follows is a series of letters that has been
known literarily as a Whores Dialogue, wherein an
older woman typically educates another woman on mat¬
ters of the wise. Tullia has written a letter to her
mentor, Madame Rosa. Madame Rosa, who has lived a
fantastically long life through the epochs of the sex
trade, writes back.

MADAME ROSA

Dear Tullia,

I understand your feelings entirely, for they are
justified. I’m afraid I cannot give you a simple an¬
swer though. This ad that you’ve come across is the
result of almost two centuries of workings by people
who, while sometimes good intentioned, have created

services. Oh, but at least they’re not selling their
bodies any more!

Others involved in anti-trafficking work believe that
it is all happening here “in plain sight”. By this
they mean that sexual exploitation - what they per¬
ceive as such - is happening in our own backyards. On
the surface this may appear closer to the truth, but
are they really approaching things so differently?
These social observers who believe the exploitation
is in plain sight still focus on “others” who are
doing the exploiting. If it’s in your own backyard,
then families, liberal and conservative alike, must
fear that their children may be exploited or may be
exploiting themselves, corrupted by outsiders! This
calls communities to action for more vigilant po¬
lice - of the citizen and professional kind - more
surveillance of neighborhoods, the removal of street
walkers. The family must be protected!

This is all quite a lot but I do hope that I’ve at
least addressed some of your questions and assuaged
some of your anxieties. It is important to continue
to stand in your power.

It really is enough to make one want to rest for an
entire century! But then again I do so enjoy our ex¬
changes .

Yours quite literally forever,

Rosa

TULLIA

Thank you for this dearth of information sweet Ma¬
dame Rosa. I am left with a lingering question - why
all this trouble, why all this fixation, why all these
myths? Why Madame Rosa why!?

er. The specter of trafficking was ideal ground for
everyone from evangelical Christians to liberal fem¬
inists to work together. And while this might sound
nice and dandy, the thing that united them was advo¬
cating for harsher criminal and economic punishments
for traffickers, for johns, and for prostitutes. It
was a commitment to incarceration as a form of jus¬
tice that relies on giving power over to the state.
Another lovely person has termed this so eloquent¬
ly as carceral feminism. I can’t overemphasize just
how detrimental this has been to the lives of people
relying on the streets to get by. There are horrible
men out there who will do the worst things to women,
but has imprisonment ever changed that? This carceral
paradigm was founded on the understanding that more
and harsher punishments will end the “exploitation”.
All it has thus done is bolstered the police, tight¬
ened the borders, put more people in jail, and made
it less safe for prostitutes.

Living up to its racist origins, anti-trafficking
organizations sit comfortably viewing “third-world”
cultures as overly traditional, “backwards”, and
blameworthy for causing trafficking. If only those
other cultures weren’t so behind - or so it goes.

This idea helps the western woman define and reinforce
her own perceived freedom and autonomy as a west¬
erner. From this viewpoint, the project of stopping
trafficking can be seen as a modernizing one, sup¬
ported by social justice and humanitarianism . This
veneer, of justice and humanitarianism, has given
organizations a wider appeal and greater legitimacy,
which has allowed them to push their definitions of
trafficking and prostitution as the definitions. Group
offering justice and humanitarianism relish in finding
“helpless victims” in foreign countries whom they can
rescue. Of course this rescue often comes in the form
of employment as low wage laborers with stringent
and punitive work contracts, prohibitions on who they
can maintain relationships with, and, in the case of
Christian operations, requirements to attend church

a life that is ever more unlivable for us. It just
makes me so mad to see the same old words spill¬
ing out again and again by people constantly missing
their meaning. This idea, that selling your body - as
they want to call it, I call it simply working - but
that selling your body is the same as sexual ex¬
ploitation is simply not new. Dressing it up in the
“wretched, overly wholesome, modern style” as you
called it - I love that - seems to be an attempt to
create a digestible product for these, what do you
call them, Millenials to consume. To understand this
better I think a brief history lesson is necessary
for we cannot know our present if we do not know the
past.

It started in the midst of slavery and picked up mo¬
mentum in its aftermath. White people were becoming
ever more fearful of having their precious idea of
racial purity polluted. As non-white immigration to
the U.S. was increasing, white people saw their iden¬
tity under attack. Simultaneously, American soldiers
were overseas forging colonial empires and it was
feared that foreign women, especially prostitutes,
would morally and physically corrupt the men. Brit¬
ain had established a precedent with the Contagious
Diseases Acts in 1864, which gave police the power
to arrest women suspected of prostitution and sub¬
ject them to compulsory exams and forced confinement
in lock hospitals if found to have any STIs, or what
they called venereal diseases back then.

This was as bad as it sounds since it treated wom¬
en, but especially women of color, as suspects to be
detained, examined and targeted for increased sur¬
veillance and state violence. This treatment was used
in the colonies and domestically. This connection is
important because in these formulations of surveil¬
lance it was race that was central for targeting cer¬
tain women. Since colonialism always breaks down ways
of living for the natives, colonial subjects moved
from their homelands to the metropoles and as they

immigrated, the borders and transit hubs were seen as
dangerous places where these morally corrupt and mor¬
ally corrupting women could be stopped. Race provided
the visibility to identify which women should be seen
as potential prostitutes, and thus threats, who need¬
ed further policing.

I’m afraid I haven’t even yet addressed your question
directly, but I’ll have to say more on it later as
I’m simply exhausted tonight.

I send you my love and strength,

Rosa

TULLIA

Dearest Madame,

Missing the meaning of words! That is exactly what I
fear! So I see then that the evil was apparently in
our drawers themselves - or rather how tidy we were
perceived to keep them! And what about diseases, ill¬
nesses, and ailments contracted by industrial jobs in
factories or in mines? The fixation on contagion seems
very much about quarantine, social isolation, aban¬
donment and surveillance - does it not?

I admit I have to stretch my mind a bit to under¬
stand these seemingly opposed perceptions of the
prostitute: was she the criminal or the victim? But
I have a suspicion that, from your words, this was
about race more than anything else. White women were
the victims, while non-white men and women were the
corruptors. I’m interested to hear if this commonly
used word “trafficking” originally concerned only the
crossing of borders. Was the threat to whiteness you
speak of always from the outside or did it also exist
internally?

things began to look as they do today. I spoke ear¬
lier of my former friends, well it was in this period
that I lost many of them - not to tragic ends, but to
stately reform. Some lovely person described this po¬
litical change as "governance feminism.” "Out of the
streets and into the state!” they chanted. I can’t
say I actually heard it put quite so bluntly but I
do believe this is what they had on their minds. The
idea was that if women could only take on more posi¬
tions in the state then the real changes could start
happen. We’re still waiting...

The significant change that really severed all possi¬
bility of friendship for me was the reactionary be¬
lief that all prostitution and even pornography was
inherently exploitative, that it was just a reflection
of internalized misogyny. Women I knew from the life
started to believe that they had only been lying to
themselves and became convinced that their experience
was the right one and must then be the experience of
everyone else. This trend often carried with it the
abhorrent belief that biology was the basis for what
it meant to be a so-called true woman. My goodness
were they blind to self-expression and the wonderful
pleasures that can come with breaking down such mun¬
dane gender norms.

Anyway, this focus, and fabrication really, on the
newfound truth of what is or isn’t sexually exploit¬
ative gave birth to the modern anti-trafficking move¬
ment as we know it. Rather than seeing the whores’
work and respecting it and asking if they might offer
support in some way, the radical feminists took it
upon themselves to state outright that tricking was
exploitation and had to be stopped - for the sake of
the prostitute of course.

In the 1980s and 90s you wouldn’t believe the forc¬
es that came together, and are still together today,
perhaps working even closer, to take on this monster
that racial puritans had proffered a century earli-

TULLIA

Dear Madame,

The picture is becoming clearer. It is sad to hear
that people once your friends turned against you!

What was it that happened for such a change to occur?

There are people today who claim to be my friend but
seem to have motives. The proponents of the “end
demand” approach, for example, claim more favor¬
able to the prostitute. This "end demand” position,
what people call the Nordic or Swedish model, aims
at criminalizing the act of purchase but not the act
of providing. As if the two could be separated - I
still struggle to understand this! You cannot have
prostitution without the purchasing of sex! Is this
not just a covert way to condemn the buying of sex
and therefore to condemn the transaction wholesale?
The picture painted here to me is the prostitute as
a victim of men’s “degraded” fantasies, giving into
and accomodating patriarchy and misogyny. What do you
think?

My head feels full and my heart heavy. In lighter
news, some angel did spray paint over the advertise¬
ment - “sex work is real work”! I can see from my
nest! It is so much prettier.

Forever a proud and painted gay woman,

Your Tullia

MADAME ROSA

Oh honorable Tullia,

Angels do appear in many forms! What you bring up
concerning the “end demand” approach might make more
sense with some context. It was in the 1980s that

Or could it be that talk of “trafficking” was just
a way to capture up molls in the life way back then
too?

Love your little wren,

Tullia

MADAME ROSA

My dear Tullia,

You have a wonderful mind indeed! I’m glad you bring
up trafficking in this context as its history is im¬
portant to know. I’ll begin again with a brief his¬
tory lesson. The first formal anti-trafficking law
happened in 1875 in direct response to Chinese immi¬
gration to the U.S. Fragile, white Congressmen were
calling this immigration a “modern slave trade sys¬
tem” - such a claim they could only make from their
recently acquired moral highground a la the 13th
Amendment. As more Chinese women immigrated - many
of whom were indeed whores, either by choice or the
limited options they had - more anti-Chinese laws
emerged, especially ones condemning prostitution and
intensifying surveillance and control of it. Finally,
the white man came clear with his opinions and made
the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which prohibited
the immigration of all working people from China -
still allowing in the well-to-do of course.

The first U.S. Immigration Bureau, formed to enforce
these laws, wanted to protect the country from the
so-called “morally, mentally and physically defi¬
cient.” And just who were these deficients? Well, the
prostitute certainly topped that list and from the
perspective of the Immigration Bureau any foreign
woman might be a prostitute. Increased policing was
justified with the reasoning that this immigration was
part of a new “modern slave trade”, which naturally

had to be opposed because of the recent formal ab¬
olition of slavery. But was it an actual opposition
to slavery or just a moral crusade against women and
prostitutes for racial and social purity?

This brings me to one of the most important myths
that tied everything together: white slavery. Noth¬
ing brought people from across the political spec¬
trum together better than the fear of white slavery.
The belief in white slavery - often referred to as
“white slave traffic” - was quite the manifestation of
white guilt and fear. The fear was that white women
specifically would be taken from their homes or from
the streets and sexually exploited and were there¬
fore victims who had to be protected and saved by
the white man. The white woman became the ultimate
innocent, helpless victim. This belief, this ideolo¬
gy, centered whiteness and feminine purity and sought
to fend off an encroaching otherness. And what was
it they felt they were saving whiteness from? Well I
believe it was the threat of everything whiteness saw
outside itself and thus feared.

In 1910 this fear was put into law with the Mann
Act, also officially known as the White Slave Traffic
Act, and which still exists today. It said, and says
still, that transport of “any woman or girl for the
purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any
other immoral purpose” was a felony crime. At the
same time it established a central database of all
"known prostitutes”, for the purpose of better track¬
ing and policing them. An interesting tid bit is that
this was the first action of the newly founded FBI,
which was invented out of this same fear.

But this Mann Act - what an ironic name! - was born
of moral panic and couldn’t do anything but foster
that. In its attempt to suppress white slave traffic
it first had to find it - and here we see the prosti¬
tute come back into focus. If white women were pros¬
titutes it must be because they were trafficked into
it and therefore needed rescuing. This was a far cry

from the view of prostitutes as dangerous, infected
foreigners polluting the pristine waters. The rea¬
son for these now opposing views of the prostitute as
either innocent white victim or as dangerous woman of
color was of course racism.

The League of Nations, however, wanted to get away
from such explicit racism and replaced “white slav¬
ery” with “traffic in women and children.” They
achieved this in name only though as they carried out
in the 1920s the first official investigations into in¬
ternational trafficking. They took their investigation
methods, funding, and ideological basis directly from
the American social hygiene movement. John D. Rocke¬
feller is a name you’ve probably heard and was one of
the many social purity reformers dedicated to combat¬
ing prostitution and with close ties to such groups
as the American Eugenics Society.

This "investigation” into worldwide trafficking was
bound up with closures of red-light districts and new
vice commissions with more repressive laws against
women suspected of prostitution. This established the
legacy that prostitutes were indistinguishable from
trafficking victims and since both needed policing
and/or rescue, policing and rescue started looking
ever more similar.

So it came to be that politicians, police and citi¬
zen brigades of former friends - women whom I once
considered close - were taking part in reforms that
have led up to what you still see today. As the 20th
century catastrophe rolled on, the perception of the
whore deepened to include not just the evil-doers but
also the innocent victims in need of rescue.

I hope this paints a clearer picture of it all.

From the depths of my evil -- to your beautiful,
whore heart,

Rosa